[jfengel]

They say that markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The same goes for the marketplace of ideas. There may be some long-term punishment for people who accept bad ideas and reason badly with them, but many people get along just fine for a very long time.

The canonical case for me is creationists, who apply some of the most trivially bad reasoning I can conceive, yet it doesn't actually mess up their daily lives. It even benefits them, since it reinforces membership in their tribe. Sure, it cuts them off from certain careers -- more than they realize -- but most people don't directly apply evolution all that often. (Indeed, many who do, like armchair evolutionary psychologists, usually do it wrong.)

People can often compartmentalize their bad reasoning in ways that the negative effects are distant enough that they get along just fine. It may bite them long term, but in the long term we're all dead anyway. The time frame in which "good ideas win in the end" may be several human lifetimes.

[rightbyte]

Except some fields of biology what fields are creationists actually not welcome in in practice? I mean some religions cuts you out of cow meat and pig farms. Creationists surely are far less limited in practice.

[xtiansimon]

> "reinforces membership in their tribe"

This was mentioned in ComicCon@HOME video panel: "Watchmen and the Cruelty of Masks" which I watched last night [1][2]

And it's been mentioned by Richard Dawkins in the context of "flat-Earthers" [3], and, of course, religion itself.

Right now I'm thinking a lot about memetics as having explanatory power for the long-term effects you describe.

[1]: https://www.comic-con.org/cciathome/2020/wednesday [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5R-9kcV0WY&feature=youtu.be [3]: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/richard-dawkins-flat-ea...